Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt is heartwarming literary fiction about the relationships that sustain us throughout the course of life.
POV alternates among three characters:
👵 Tova Sullivan, an elderly widowed Swedish immigrant whose son drowned in the sea under mysterious circumstances when he was 18 years old, and who works cleaning at the Sowell Bay Aquarium because she feels the need to keep busy even if she doesn’t need the money
🤷♂️ Cameron Cassmore, a highly intelligent yet deadbeat 30 year old whose search for a means to pull himself up out of the rut of his life leads him to Sowell Bay, Washington
and
🐙Marcellus, a(n even more?) highly intelligent Giant Pacific Octopus who resents being captive at the aquarium and who just can’t even with humans anymore
The relationships that develop among these characters are quite touching. Family and growing old are themes throughout the book.
The parents will grow old atop this mountain of a family they’ve built, and even if parts of it crumble from time to time, there will be enough left to support them.
The characters that comprise the Knit-Wits, the groups of septuagenarians who get together for regularly scheduled lunches, were each so realistic—I could picture people from my real life who matched each of them almost to a T.
Overall this is a sad but ultimately heartwarming tale, and it gets bonus points for naming a secondary octopus Pippa the Grippa!
Nettle & Bone is fantasy from T. Kingfisher, and it’s lovely! There’s a good deal here that is more original than your standard fantasy fare these days.
Marra wants to protect her sister, even if that means killing a king. She isn’t some chosen one with supercharged powers, just a concerned relative and almost-nun who can embroider a mean stitch. It’s her determination that sees her completing unpleasant and even “impossible” tasks in order to recruit allies that can help her with her Quest.
The resulting fellowship is just plain wonderful: a wicked fairy godmother who enjoys gardening and animal husbandry, and who chooses blessings over curses; a warrior enslaved in the goblin market; a dust-wife who can communicate with the dead and who is accompanied by a hen possessed by a demon; and one Very Good Boy resurrected from bones. They must deal with a sorceress cursed with immortality and a catacomb filled with the royal dead, among other things.
And it’s FUNNY! If you like humorous cozy fantasy that still has high stakes, you should give this book a try.
How far would you be willing to go in the name of protecting your loved ones? And, perhaps more importantly, are you for or against demon chicken?
🐙 Come for the octopuses, stay for the story about communion, consciousness, and control!
The Mountain in the Sea is science fiction set in a near future when many industries are fully automated with AI. The Con Dao archipelago of Vietnam is a wildlife sanctuary for many species, including octopuses so intelligent they just might rivals humans. A tech corporation with a vested interest in seeing what can be learned from these animals has sent in researchers and sealed the area off, protecting it by deadly means if necessary.
The characters that this book primarily follows are:
Ha Nguyen, a marine biologist who struggles with the indifference people feel for the things that don’t personally affect them, and who learns the importance of connection, making oneself understood, and striving to understand others even if it doesn’t mean always agreeing with each other.
Rustem, a Tartar hacking genius who may have gotten involved in something bigger than he realized.
Eiko, a young Japanese man enslaved on an automated fishing rig.
Other characters include a badass mercenary security specialist from a nunnery, a scientist seeking mastery of creating consciousness in an attempt to fend off her own loneliness, and an android whose very existence puts them at risk from those who feel threatened by the idea of a nonhuman mind. Some of the verbal exchanges between the android and the security agent were a joy, very funny!
The octopuses feature a lot less in this book than I thought they would – I mean, a good portion of it is ABOUT the octopuses, but they actually only show up in a handful of scenes. It’s more about the people studying them, and how the world both exist in has been shaped by conscious ingenuity and all the good and bad it creates.
The first book in the Emily Wilde series by Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, is darkly delightful!
Stuffy Cambridge professor and dryadology expert Emily Wilde travels to an isolated Arctic Nordic island to perform field research on faeries. With her loyal dog, reference books galore, and her trusty journal, she is ready to contend with troublesome but benign common Fae, malevolent and powerful courtly Fae, and any scientific or scholarly challenges that come her way. What she is not prepared to face, however, are the locals and the societal conventions that come with interacting with them.
Emily’s infuriatingly charming colleague Wendell Bambleby invites himself to assist in her research, showing up at her rented cottage unannounced. Might he have any ulterior motives? I was not expecting the gentle ‘opposites attract’ romance aspect of the story that shows up here, but it was one of my favorite parts!
…it is hard not to be entertained by Bambleby. It is one of the things I resent most about him. That and the fact that he considers himself my dearest friend, which is only true in the sense that he is my sole friend.
There are abductions and dismemberment in this book, but also a heartwarming tale of how a socially awkward academic learns to become part of a community. It is presented as Emily’s journal (with a helpful entry or two provided by Bambleby), complete with footnotes, because: stuffy academic.
I cannot wait for book two, for more amusing Emily and Bambleby banter!
“Why don’t we go for a stroll? You can entertain me with a list of your demands. Then I can find a nice place to nap whilst you hunt for some common fae to harass.”
I was very excited to dive into this new fantasy novel from the creator of Murderbot, Witch King by Martha Wells! It comes complete with map, dramatis personae, and a gorgeous color palette.
Kai is a demon prince of the underearth. The book opens with him coming to, looking down at the corpse of his most recent host body in a glass coffin, and realizing he must have been murdered and then his consciousness trapped by magical means inside the tomb, preventing him from taking up residence another body. Lucky for him, a mage foolish enough to think he could control Kai and bind him as a familiar just unwittingly sprung him from his prison. Now Kai and his ride or die Zeide, who was also imprisoned, are on a mission to discover who betrayed them, and why.
This book presents alternating timelines. After a few chapters detailing this quest, there will be a chapter explaining Kai’s past, beginning more than a mortal lifetime ago: Kai as a young demon new to the mortal world, when a treaty between the underearth and a nomadic grassland peoples had resulted in the bodies of the latter’s dead being honored by hosting a demon, who will then briefly have access to the deceased’s mind and be able to share their final thoughts; Kai as a captive of the Hierarchs, a powerful civilization that came from the south and wiped out all societies in their path; Kai meeting the Witch Zeide, the Imortal Marshall Tahren, and the Prince-heir Bashasa of Benais-arik when the conquered peoples planned to rise up in rebellion against the Hierarchs and in hopes of ushering in a new world order. Along the way the reader is treated to plenty of action, adventure, and found family.
“How did it come to this, Kai? I remember how we started. Now you’re all razor blades and I’m an angry shrew.”
“No…You’re righteously furious. You’ve always had the high ground, Zeide…You’re right about me and the razors, though.” Most of the time he felt like he was made of razors, bleeding from the inside.
“I’ve always loved your razors, Kai. They’ve cut us out of a number of tangles. But it would be good if one day you could stop bleeding.”
There were many lovely characters and sentiments in this story. However, as much as I liked the world, the worldbuilding was rather complex and dense. There were also so many descriptions of what people were wearing, all the time. Descriptions of locations left me feeling a bit lost, as did the particulars of the different magic systems.
I liked Kai, but I’m a sucker for antiheroes and morally gray characters, and while even though Kai possesses (ha, a little demon humor there) some badass abilities, he is 100% teddy bear. Which will probably make him more sympathetic to some readers, just not as spicy. He is amusing at times, though!
“…why shouldn’t I sit next to a demon?” He turned to Kai. “Will I die if I touch you?”
“No,” Kai said, eyeing him. He seemed utterly sincere. “But don’t touch me.”
As much as I thought I was liking the story, I did find I had to keeping talking myself into picking it back up, so clearly I wasn’t 100% engaged. Then the final resolution of the “current day” timeline felt kind of anticlimactic. The things I mention here stopped me from loving this book, but I certainly still appreciated many things about it.
Leech by Hiron Ennes is Gothic horror set in a post-apocalyptic future. After climate disaster and the backfiring of man-made technology drove people underground, they finally resurfaced when it was safe(ish) and rebuilt, reclaiming some of the knowledge that was lost through records that were spared.
The main character is actually a gestalt intelligence formed by a parasite that takes control of the human hosts it infects. It hoards the world’s recovered medical knowledge for job security, in order to stay relevant and needed by humanity, and to maintain its evolutionary niche.
While working as a doctor for the draconian baron in the frozen wilds of the North (stalked by beings with unknown origins, but plenty of mythological possible origin stories), they discover a new (probably ancient but newly resurfaced) parasite that threatens everything.
The world-building here is truly impressive!
Of course the baron lives in a crumbling chateau and his family is comprised of a strange cast of characters (and ghosts?). Consent and bodily autonomy are big players in the story that unfolds.
Not for the faint of heart, this tale is creative, creepy, and really quite wonderful! I can’t wait to see what this author does next.
Between this book, Mexican Gothic, and What Moves the Dead, I’ve learned that apparently parasite horror is my jam!
Such a creative structure to this Pulitzer Prize-winning literary historical fiction novel! The form and some striking prose made this a 5 star read for me.
The four parts of the book are presented as a novel, the rough draft of a memoir, a complete memoir, and the entries in of private journal. You may be confused as to the point at first, but as you read along you will begin to realize what the different sections have to do with one another, and just what it is that they represent.
The story at the center revolves around the lives of a New York City power couple in the early twentieth century, a husband and wife whose social standing was gained through great successes on Wall Street. But taken together, the four parts of the book make the point that those in positions of relative power (due to wealth, status, sex, influence/reach) get to decide which voices are heard, thereby controlling the narrative and effectively “bending and realigning reality”.
And if the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction isn’t enough to tickle your discerning reader’s fancy, Trust was also one of The New York Times top ten books of 2022, longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, AND one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2022. BOOM!
After witnessing her teenage son kill a man she has never seen before, Jen finds herself further and further in the past each time she wakes up, and tries to understand what happened and why.
This time loop mystery not only keeps you guessing (well, I figured out the twists somewhere between pages 200 and 250, but it was still fun reading on to learn the “why” of things), it’s also a rather touching portrayal of how wonderful and difficult parenthood is.
Everything in parenthood feels so endless until it ceases.
They, mother and son, are a zipper, slowly separating as the years rush by.
The maternal habit of a lifetime, feeling guilty no matter which she chose.
Re-examining her relationships as she relives certain days from her past is just part of the investigating Jen performs while trying to understand what led to a stranger dead and her son in cuffs.
I do admit that several inconsistencies and oddities in the writing really got to me at times. Todd is described as pale in one scene, but then two days in the past he was tanned; he is said to have his father’s eyes and otherwise his features are all from his mother, but then later we read that he looks just like his father; a photograph of man with a shaved head is later described as a photograph of a man with light hair; the last time a certain day played out, we’re told both that Jen said something different to another character, but also that the last time it played out they never even saw each other. Jen’s husband has a tattoo of an inscribed date, the day he knew he loved her: “spring 2003” (that is a season, not a day); and a “quick, clean stab” resulted in three stab wounds. She assumed her son’s moodiness, secrecy, and weight loss were all just due to being a teenager; what could explain his recent bahavior: teenage rage, knife crime, gangs, or Antifa? I’m sorry, knife crime? That being included in that list just made me outright laugh.
Although it’s possible that some things I just misinterpreted due to differences in vernacular between British and American English (just as there was a lot of slang I wasn’t familiar with). They keep the office at 65 degrees, and whether that’s Celsius or Fahrenheit, either way seems too cold or much too hot. And she has a sofa in her kitchen at home, which Google tells me apparently is a thing, but just not a thing I can get on board with.
But despite these things, this was still a really engaging story, and I can recommend it without qualms to fans of thrillers and mysteries with a dash of sci-fi for flavor.
And for one last extremely relatable quote:
It’s useless to clean, she acknowledges, as she scrubs at the kitchen countertops and stacks the dishwasher. When she wakes up, yesterday, none of this will have been done, but isn’t that kind of always the way housework feels?
“What happens when the walls we raise outlive the dangers they were built to keep out? At what point does a fort become a cage?”
Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott is a colorful adventure steeped in Eastern European folklore. It takes place in the current day U.S., and some magical elements borne of momentous events from long ago have left marks so profound they have been passed down through generations of the Yaga family.
“Lies? Of course, lies. But what is a lie if not a story? And ah, what power a story has when whispered into the ear of a man with a gun.”
A family of puppeteers and their newly inherited house on chicken legs are running from the Longshadow Man. But who/what/when is the Longshadow Man?
“We know plenty about what he isn’t,” Rummy offered with forced optimism.
“He’s not a jelly doughnut,” Sparrow contributed.
In essence the story is about bearing witness to past injustices that have taken on a life of their own and haunt the world still.
“A mob has no ears to call to, only a single mouth, yelling. A mob has no hands to hold, only a single finger, pointing. A mob has no head, only a single body, guideless, acting as it will.”
There a several interesting characters filling this tale, with nice LGBTIA+ representation, and a story as fun as it is meaningful. The prose is rather gorgeous. Thistlefoot was born to run, but catching hold of it will be well worth your while!
Jessica Crawford 